As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass..., I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was seized with a violent tremour.

To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.

Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine.

There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.